How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

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Posted In: General Chat 

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

Hello and welcome to another article. This weeks article was actually supposed to be a video showing you around one of my affiliate programs and how it is all run, I recorded the video last night but whilst it was being produced the program crashed and I lost the recording, so you’ll have to put up with my writing instead 😉

It’s no co-incidence that I am writing this article at the same time as my Boomerang List Builder affiliate program launch, but I was going to tell you about the launch anyway so I figured I would kill 2 birds with 1 stone and write a newsletter on the same subject.

Running your own affiliate program for your product can be the difference between 10 and 100 sales, if I didn’t have an affiliate program in place, I wouldn’t have sold as many copies of the Boomerang List Builder as I have done, but setting up an affiliate program isn’t all plain sailing. Let me take you by the hand (UK Hell’s Kitchen viewers please note that I am in no way affiliated with Marco Pierre White!) and guide you through setting up your own affiliate program.

Now regular readers will remember that I did a very similar post in February of this year, you can view the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

So I won’t be going over any of that again, if you don’t understand some of the things in this article, refer to the older one above and it should clear a few things up!

Step 1

The first thing that you need to do is decide how you will be running your program, will you be using an in house program, or will you be using someone like clickbank to manage affiliates and commissions?

For the Boomerang List Builder launch I used clickbank, this was because they have a huge affiliate network and they handle all affiliate payments for me. However, due to circumstances beyond my control, clickbank were unable to support the Boomerang List Builder after the launch, so I decided to use my own hosted solution, I use the script “Post Affiliate Pro”.

Step 2

The next step is to set up the tracking, different scripts have different tracking and integration methods so check the instruction manual for your script. Most will require you to add some sort of code to your landing pages, and to your thankyou pages so sales can be tracked. When you are confident everything has been set up, do some testing, I can’t stress how important this is, you need to make sure sales are tracking before you offer your program to the public!

Step 3

This step is something that a lot of people miss out on – customize your affiliate area and affiliate pages! I lose count on the number of times I have joined an affiliate program and I am presented with the same generic sign up pages, it’s only a small thing but it makes me think that if the product creator can’t be bothered to integrate a sign up form into his site design then he obviously doesn’t think much of his affiliates!

Take a look at my sign up page, it’s integrated into my site design and only took 10 minutes to put up:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 4

You need to give your affiliates a reason to promote your product, when they go to your page, they don’t know how the product converts or anything about the product. You can see that on my sign up page I have added a screen shot showing affiliates how the product is converting. With a product that converts at 4.7% (The Boomerang List Builder) they would expect to get, on average, about 5 sales for every 100 visitors they send to the website.

I used DLGuard to process payments and handle the software delivery as it includes a cool little feature that shows you how well your products are converting! You can see my conversions here:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 5

Give your affiliates some resources! And by “resources” I don’t just mean the odd affiliate banner. With the Boomerang List Builder program I have provided affiliates with a range of banners, articles (created just for the affiliate program), promotional emails and even a couple of text links that can be used as forum or email sigs!

Here’s on of my “different” banner designs, don’t worry, there are also some conventional
ones in there as well!

Boomerang List Builder

Step 6

Ask existing subscribers and customers to kindly sign up for the affiliate program and help you promote the product, this is where you guys come in 😉

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Many thanks for reading, I do hope that you have found some of this article useful. As I said at the start, if you need to know about things in more detail, including how you go about starting an affiliate program, check out the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

Until next time,
Dan




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Comments

3 Responses to “How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program”
  1. John Thornhill says:
    Friday, 12 October 2007 at 3:57 pm

    Some excellent advice there Dan. Especially the affiliate resources info. I have lost count of the amount of programs I have not promoted because there were no affiliate resources for me to use.

    I have been guilty of making the same mistake in the past with my own products but not anymore.

    Your affiliate resources page is almost as important as your sales copy. After all your affiliates will make the bulk of your sales so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to promote.

  2. Randy Smith says:
    Friday, 12 October 2007 at 4:05 pm

    Great info as usual Dan (Even if I never do understand a word of it — it always reassures me that at least you do)

    When I’m making excessive bundles of extra income _ I will try and get around to emplying someone who can understnd the techy side of things… until then – I’ll keep visiting here and then pestering when you’re not playing footy or having 3 day breaks…lol

    I love the banner thingy (<= my attempt at a techy description) – I’m sure some people will prefer the more traditional ones…. but it’s nice to be different,….lol

    Randy
    http://www.SuccessAndYourHead.com

  3. Swaminathan Viramani says:
    Sunday, 28 October 2007 at 4:56 am

    Hey Dan

    Can Post Affiliate Pro be integrated on a wordpress blog too? Have you tried this? Would appreciate a reply on my email please.